@shedletsky creeps will always need names. There's currently no way to get IDs during the spawn call.
The discussion is more about the extra requirement spawning a creep now has, namely giving a name to the creep.

You used to be able to just pass "undefined" and it would generate a name for you.

I published a screeps specific uuid library that will generate unique IDs (even taking shards into account). You could use this for creep names and then you'd be able to ensure they could cross shards without collisions.